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Libyan Tribal Intrigue May Be Obama’s Swamp

For those curious about what’s below the surface in Libya, beyond the simplistic “good rebels” versus “bad dictator” we hear from most of the western media, one can find an excellent report today by Charles Levinson – “Behind Libya Rifts, Tribal Politics”. It is a stroll through the powerful tribal allegiances that fuel the Libyan conflict today, as they have for hundreds of years.

A week ago we noted the signs of an “internecine and degenerative” conflict rather than simply a democratic uprising… and this danger of civil war looks even closer now. The jockeying of Libyan tribes for power has been going on for over a century. While many in Libya want an end to injustice, or an inclusion in the economic rewards of an oil economy, the eastern Cyrenaica tribes want something more: as one astute Libyan called it, the return of control “over what is rightfully theirs” – the return of Cyrenaican rule over all the other tribes of Libya. But many other tribes, now allied with the current government, have no intention of giving up their power and spoils obtained at the expense of the eastern tribes.

The spoils of tribal loyalism in Libya are almost as stunning as is the degradation of tribal exclusion. There are the government jobs, social benefits and neighborhood infrastructure that come with tribal support to the regime, in contrast to the open sewers, unemployment and barren infrastructure of tribal exclusion seen in Benghazi:

“The city of one million has one sewage treatment plant, built more than 40 years ago. Waste is just flushed into the ground or the sea, and when the water table rises in winter, the streets become open cesspools. Benghazi, the second largest city in a country with vast oil wealth and a tiny population, is rotting in its own fifth.”

To further the control of tribes over their population, there is the tradition of ‘collective responsibility’ of each tribe for any disloyalty amongst its members. Thus when leaders of the Warfalla tribe plotted a coup in 1993, the entire tribe paid the penalty. This punishment of disloyal tribes is not exclusive to the Gaddafi regime, but was a hallmark also of King Idris’ rule in the 1950’s and 60’s.

“King Idriss Senussi, maintained power with the support of his privileged castle guard, known as the Cyrenaican Defense Force. Their ranks were filled almost exclusively with members of eastern Libya’s Saady tribes.”

King Idris used the Senussi religious ties to maintain loyalty of the eastern tribes, and this monarchy was overthrown by Gaddafi’s revolt in 1968 in part for its exclusion of all tribes in the center and west of Libya – Qaddafi’s included. While Qaddafi initially attempted to do away with tribal rule after coming to power, he soon found it too powerful and instead reverted back to the traditional tribal councils to manage loyalties.

The loyalties to power are strong. One now witnesses more loyal tribes sabotaging the rebels, not only in Sirte (Gaddafi’s hometown) and Tripoli, but in Bin Jawad and other western towns. As Reuters noted,

“Rebels said they had been relying on the residents of government-held towns to rise up and join them, but this is likely to become harder as they move west into more affluent areas that have benefitted from Gaddafi’s rule. […]

“‘We got calls from the people of Bin Jawad telling us to come through and that all was well. Then we were ambushed,’ said Hani Zwei. ‘I can’t believe our own countrymen would do that.'”

While tribal brinkmanship may surprise some urban youth, others are keenly aware of it, as in this debate between rebels:

“‘Whoever has a gun, go now and fight in Bin Jawad,’ said one rebel.
“‘No, no this is how we’ll start the civil war,’ hit back the other.”

The 1,000 years of tribal history is hardly lost on those in the leadership of the rebellion:

“Many of the leaders now emerging in eastern Libya hail from the Harabi tribe, including the head of the provisional government set up in Benghazi, Abdel Mustafa Jalil, and Abdel Fatah Younis, who assumed a key leadership role over the defected military ranks early in the uprising.

“‘If you scratch the surface, you’ll find a lot of the new leaders, a lot of those who defected to the rebels early, are from old tribes and families who served the Senussi monarchy,’ [Jason Pack, a Libya scholar at Oxford University] said.”

Meanwhile the rumors of Gaddafi’s ‘black African foreign mercenaries’ continues apace, in what HRW calls “lazy, irresponsible journalism on the part of the mainstream media who publish rumors as truth”. The rumors have been used by the rebels to stoke the historical racial violence and hatred in eastern Libya toward the dark-skinned Libyans from the southern Fezzan tribes, also supporters of Qaddafi.

If this rat’s nest of alliances, betrayal and tribal intrigue sounds familiar to Americans, it should. They are still reeling from their unlearned lessons of the unwinnable politics of tribalism in America’s adventure in Afghanistan – what Obama called “the necessary war” – and in Iraq.

Perhaps it should not be surprising also that Obama sees in this festering swamp of internecine Libyan warfare a “wide range of potential options, including potential military options” as he steps slowly but inexorably into the interventionist camp with the warhawks Kerry, Clinton and McCain. Whether this slide into another war is already unstoppable, is too soon to tell, but we can rest assured that NATO is already taking Obama’s hint and preparing the option of an end-run around the UN’s Security Council, which is opposed to intervention. Says NATO Secretary General Rasmussen,

“If Gaddafi and his military continue to attack the Libyan population systematically, I can’t imagine the international community and UN standing idly by.”